Review

Author(s): Andrew Steptoe

Review by: Andrew Steptoe
Source: Music & Letters, Vol. 80, No. 1 (Feb., 1999), pp. 125-128
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/854676
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 those pieces examined. Whether others will build
on his approach remains to be seen. Certainly, as
Eitan himself points out, it would be beneficial to
go on to investigate a wider repertory. But it would
be good to see this carried out with rather more
historical awareness-and not only to avoid the
pitfalls of teleology mentioned above. Certainly
Eitan's basic thesis would have been more author-
itative if he had undertaken fuller discussion of his
choice of repertory. I find myself wondering why
Haydn was chosen to represent Classicism, rather
than Mozart, who is generally regarded as more
melodically minded-and why early Haydn at that,
a repertory in which Classicism was to some extent
still emerging. Berg, too, could have been better
served in terms of contextualization: his use of
contour in the Adagio appassionato of the Lyric
Suite is described as constituting 'an exaggerated,
somewhat hysterical version of Wagnerian or
Brucknerian processes' (p. 139), but comparison
with Mahler, Strauss, Zemlinsky and early Schoen-
berg-his most immediate exemplars-would
surely have been more illuminating.
CHRISTOPHER MARK
The Mozart Family: Four Lives in a Social Context. By
Ruth Halliwell. pp. xl + 732. (Clarendon Press,
Oxford, 1998, ?30. ISBN 0-19-816371-1.)
The Mozart Family is a biographical study of the
composer, his father, his mother and his sister
Nannerl. Ruth Halliwell argues that the Mozarts
have hitherto been viewed solely in relation to the
composer's development, to the neglect of other
family members. She is particularly interested in
the characters of Nannerl and Mozart's father
Leopold, and promises a 'rigorous contextual
study' of the family in the context of the social
conditions prevailing in their home town of Salz-
burg.
The core of the book is an examination of family
correspondence from the birth of the children in
the 1750s through to the early nineteenth century.
The book is divided into six sections, largely
structured according to the episodes of Wolfgang
Mozart's life: the early years and tours through
northern Europe; the journeys to Italy and first
period of service in Salzburg; the journey by
Wolfgang and his mother to Mannheim and
Paris; the years surrounding his break with Salz-
burg and marriage to Constanze; Nannerl's mar-
riage to Johann Berchtold von Sonnenburg and her
move to St Gilgen; and the years following Leo-
pold's and Wolfgang's deaths, when both Nannerl
and Constanze Mozart negotiated extensively with
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publishers. All the family's correspondence that is
known to have survived is of course published in
German, and a substantial portion has been trans-
lated into English by Emily Anderson and others.
However, Halliwell feels that previous comment-
ators have failed to apply 'stringent historical
procedures' to the evidence, and that some of
their inferences have therefore been erroneous.
I was disappointed by this book. It failed to live
up to the promise of studying the Mozart family in
a social context. A study of social context must
surely involve locating people within the cultural
and social milieu of their times, so that, rather than
studying their lives and experiences in the abstract,
they are considered in relation to contemporary
mores. But apart from a description of the immedi-
ate social world in which the Mozarts moved in
Salzburg, the background is only sketched. We
find out very little about the political situation, the
intense religious disputes of the era (which had
direct effects on Leopold Mozart as an employee of
the Church), the growth of the Enlightenment,
attitudes to women and the family, or standards
of living and lifestyle. The social context in which
the family developed is presented superficially. For
example, they spent many of the early years living
on the road in countries with strange customs, food
and climate, and unfamiliar religious observances,
surrounded by languages they did not understand.
Neither Wolfgang nor his sister had opportunities
to make lasting friendships with children of their
own age, and neither went to school. Instead they
moved as an extended family unit within an almost
exclusively adult world. These factors are not
described, and their impact on family relationships
and the children's development is not discussed.
Or take the period between 1773, when Wolfgang
returned from Italy for the last time, and 1777,
when he left Salzburg to seek his fortune in
Germany. These years were spent in Salzburg,
and coincide with Mozart's growth from adoles-
cence to adulthood and growing desire for inde-
pendence. It was an epoch of intense creative
fertility, during which he composed several sym-
phonies and large-scale serenades, along with the
violin concertos, religious music, keyboard sonatas
and string quartets. Yet these crucial years are
covered very briefly, and we learn little about
aspects such as Leopold's and Wolfgang's duties
at the cathedral and court, whether musicians were
treated any better at other courts, what Nannerl
Mozart did over these years, or how the theatre
opposite their home was used.
Mozart's mother Maria Anna is one of the four
family members at the centre of this book, but she
fails to emerge from the shadows. Almost nothing
is written about her attitudes to life and music,
religion, or beliefs about how her children should
be educated. She was evidently rather ineffectual in
curbing Wolfgang's wayward enthusiasms on the
journey to Mannheim and Paris, yet Leopold
seldom became irritated with her. The possible
causes of her death are not discussed; instead,
Halliwell speculates about whether Wolfgang
delayed calling a doctor to tend her because of
preoccupations with his own affairs, irrespective of
whether medical attention would have been helpful
in this case.
Halliwell seems to interpret social context rather
narrowly. One reason is that the family letters take
such a central role. Halliwell explains how she
decided not to quote extensively but, rather, to
precis the contents of the correspondence. This is a
pity, since the method robs the correspondence of
much of its vitality. Shorn of their rhetoric, insight-
ful asides and the almost theatrical changes of
mood and pace, many of the letters emerge as
plodding and charmless. The contents of the letters
are often summarized almost without comment.
For instance, the early weeks of 1778 contain the
extraordinary exchange between father and son,
when Wolfgang's sudden infatuation with Aloysia
Weber led him to extravagant plans to abandon the
family's agenda and travel to Italy. His naive
assumption that his father would join in his
enthusiasm, and the frustrated despair of Leopold
as he tried to influence events from a distance,
reveal the gulf that had developed between the two,
and are a gripping commentary on their crumbling
relationship. The author misses the opportunity to
discuss Wolfgang's emotional development, his
mother's role, or Leopold's realization that he
was losing control over his life's work and his
cherished son.
There is an additional difficulty in basing a book
on the family's correspondence, which is that so
many letters are lost. After 1781, none of Leopold's
letters to his son have survived, even though they
maintained a regular exchange; presumably Wolf-
gang did not take care of them. None of Wolfgang's
letters to Salzburg written between 1785 and
Leopold's death in 1787 have survived either.
Halliwell suggests that, by this time, Leopold had
abandoned earlier plans he had had to write about
his son's life, and so took no further interest in
keeping the letters. It is perhaps more plausible
that it was Nannerl who kept the family letters.
After she married and moved to St Gilgen, she was
no longer able to save her brother's correspondence
from loss or destruction. It is notable thai she
stored all Leopold's letters to her in St Gilgen,
while he kept none of her replies.
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The author solves the difficulty of the patchy
record by inferring the contents of the lost letters
from the replies to them. The system works well up
to a point, but it is not always clear which
statements are speculations and which are summa-
ries of actual letters. There are also occasions when
the sequence of events is reconstructed rather too
imaginatively. For example, Wolfgang wrote from
Vienna to his sister on 19 September 1781, having
recently been told by Leopold that she was ill. He
comforted her and strongly urged her to move to
Vienna, where together they would be able to
support their father in his declining years. In a
postscript, Wolfgang sympathized with Leopold for
the dizziness that he had evidently described in a
previous letter. Halliwell interprets these happen-
ings as Nannerl falling seriously ill, and Leopold
devotedly nursing her, while worrying about his
son in Vienna. 'The combined worries affected his
own health, and he suffered dizzy spells' (p. 367).
There is no evidence for this sequence; we do not
know whether Leopold had dizzy spells before,
during or after Nannerl's illness, whether she
required nursing, or whether his indisposition
had anything to do with worry.
Ruth Halliwell is not much interested in Wolf-
gang Mozart in this book. Music is scarcely
mentioned and never discussed. Wolfgang's rela-
tionship with Constanze is treated cursorily, and
his tender letters to his wife are not included.
Indeed, the last four years of Wolfgang's life
(following the death of his father) are covered in
just six pages. Nor does she seem to like him much.
She describes him as conceited, selfishly preoccu-
pied with his own life, insensitive in his contacts
with Salzburg, and a disappointment to his father.
It is really Leopold and Nannerl who are the
central characters. Because Leopold's letters to
his daughter have not been published in English,
unless they explicitly mention Wolfgang, much of
the narrative concerning Nannerl's life in St Gilgen
will be unfamiliar to readers.
Nannerl herself is something of an enigma. What
turned the girl who up to the age of sixteen played
in public to aristocrats and rulers into the retiring
individual whose life in Salzburg revolved around a
few private keyboard pupils, churchgoing and
domestic acquaintance? Was she prevented from
exploiting her talent by her domineering father?
Unlikely, because he was ambitious and enterpris-
ing, and never expressed disapproval of female
professional musicians. Was she not good enough
as a performer? Again, this is improbable, given
Wolfgang's confidence throughout his life that she
could play his newest music. Was she perhaps too
much in the shadow of her brother's phenomenal
 talent, or was she so committed to her immediate
family and domestic responsibilities that she felt
unable to strike out with an independent career?
Perhaps she shared the disdain expressed so fre-
quently by Leopold and Wolfgang about the
boorish behaviour of musicians, and felt that to
be a musician was not a sufficiently ladylike
profession.
Whatever the cause, Nannerl Mozart lived
quietly in Salzburg with her father until she was
33, when she married Berchtold, the Pfleger, or
administrator, of the lands around St Gilgen. She
moved to the house in St Gilgen where her mother
was bor. Little is known about the events leading
up to her marriage. She had for more than three
years been attached to Franz d'Ippold, the director
of the school that was situated virtually next door to
the Mozarts' apartment in Salzburg. The couple
were probably in love, and marriage was discussed.
It is not known why the relationship foundered, how
Nannerl met Berchtold, or why she married him.
Apart from a perfunctory statement after his death
that he was her 'most dearly beloved husband', we
know nothing of Nannerl's feelings for him.
Certainly, the position into which she moved
does not seem enviable. St Gilgen was small and
remote, with only a handful of educated inhabi-
tants. She inherited five stepchildren aged between
two and twelve, who were poorly educated, bad-
mannered and ran wild. Her lifeline to civilization
and culture was Leopold, and their letters were
conveyed across the six-hour journey between
Salzburg and St Gilgen by the weekly official
courier or by the glass-carrier who plied her trade
along this route. Leopold provided her with gossip
about acquaintances in Salzburg, practical advice,
new music and news of her brother. But it was at a
cost. He was fiercely critical to the point of nasti-
ness about her unruly stepchildren, and sarcastic
about Berchtold's parsimony and pretensions, put-
ting her in an uncomfortable position of divided
loyalties.
Leopold Mozart lost a major portion of his raison
d'etre with Wolfgang's break for independence in
Vienna, and Nannerl's departure left him com-
pletely bereft. He complained about the dullness of
life in Salzburg and the lack of agreeable conversa-
tion. The contrast with the exciting social and
musical world that he encountered during his
stay with his son in Vienna in 1785 was marked.
Interestingly, Nannerl apparently raised several
objections when this visit was mooted, fearing
perhaps that Leopold might be persuaded to
move to Vienna, leaving her isolated. Soon after
his return, Nannerl's first child, 'Leopoldl', was
born. He was to stay with Leopold in Salzburg for
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the rest of his grandfather's life, seeing his mother
and father only occasionally during their visits from
St Gilgen. The arrangement seems to have been a
satisfactory one, giving Leopold a focus of affection
in his life, while relieving Nannerl of the care of an
infant along with the other children. Nonetheless,
the interesting consequence was that Nannerl's
former lover d'Ippold saw much more of her first-
born than she did. Leopold also deliberately failed
to tell his son about the situation, and Wolfgang
learnt about it by chance a year later. Halliwell
suggests that Leopold was somewhat ashamed of
Nannerl's marriage, which had perhaps been pre-
sented to Wolfgang as very desirable, and so he did
not want to reveal any shortcomings.
The last section of the book shifts gear to a
different set of issues. It is concerned with the
development of Mozart's reputation after his
death, and the sources of the early biographies.
Constanze Mozart, hitherto virtually ignored, now
assumes a central role along with Nannerl. Neither
appears in an especially positive light, although the
publishers such as Breitkopf & Hartel with whom
they negotiated were far from scrupulous them-
selves. It was particularly distasteful that Nannerl
connived with the Kapellmeister in Salzburg to
cheat the old and ailing Michael Haydn by
having his music secretly copied from parts held
by the court, so that Breitkopf & Hartel could
publish it without having to pay the composer a
fee. In 1821, Constanze and her second husband
Georg Nissen returned to Salzburg, where the
widowed Nannerl had been living since 1801. In
contrast to the majority of music historians, Halli-
well asserts that the two women were on good
terms and that the claim that relations were poor
is a fiction. It is difficult to know what she would
regard as adequate proof of their bad relationship,
for the circumstantial evidence is surely over-
whelming. First, there was the violent hostility to
Constanze and her mother expressed by Leopold
Mozart before the marriage. Nannerl was living
with her father at the time and so would have been
well aware that Leopold felt his son had been
seduced by the unscrupulous Webers. Second,
there is scarcely a mention of Constanze in Leo-
pold's letters to Nannerl, even though he passed on
to her the least scrap of information about her
brother. This is hardly an indication that Con-
stanze was a treasured sister-in-law. The absence of
correspondence between Constanze and Nannerl,
either during Wolfgang's life or afterwards, is also
striking. Nannerl evidently hoarded documents
and family memorabilia, so either they had no
contact or else she considered it insignificant.
Most telling of all was Nannerl's decision not to
be buried in the same plot as her father Leopold
and daughter Josepha, after Constanze's husband
Nissen had been interred there, and a tombstone
had been erected that bore his name alone. The
hostility engendered by this act must have been
very bitter, to persuade a religious woman like
Nannerl to be separated from her beloved father.
This is a long book and quite heavy going.
Probably more than half of the text is taken up
with summaries of the letters of Leopold and
Wolfgang. It assumes extensive knowledge of
Mozart's life and correspondence, since characters
such as the Mozarts' Augsburg cousin Maria Anna
Thekla (the Basle) and the Salzburg castrato Fran-
cesco Ceccarelli enter the narrative with little
introduction. Familiarity with the secondary liter-
ature is also taken for granted, as Halliwell devel-
ops arguments that are specifically opposed to
those of authors such as Maynard Solomon and
Nannerl Mozart's biographer Eva Rieger. All in all,
this is not a book that I can recommend.
ANDREW STEPTOE
journals such as the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek
and political newspapers such as the Hamburgischer
German Music Criticism in the Late Eighteenth Century:
Aesthetic Issues in Instrumental Music. By Mary Sue
Morrow. pp. xiii + 253. (Cambridge University
Press, 1997. ?40. ISBN 0-521-58227-X.)
The growing interest in the history of music
criticism among musicologists, of which Mary
Sue Morrow's latest book is an indication, is in
many ways a reflection of the field itself, which for
the past several decades has been inexorably
transforming itself into a critical enterprise. One
of the merits of Morrow's book is that, at the very
least, it helps put this latter phenomenon in
perspective, showing how a large number of writers
at the end of the eighteenth century worked in a
similar fashion to transform the musical discourse
of their time.
These critics, whose backgrounds and creden-
tials were very diverse, faced, Morrow suggests, a
uniform task-making the independent instrumen-
tal music of their day comprehensible in terms that
escaped from the limitations of academic aesthetic
theory. In so doing, they prepared the way for the
nineteenth century's high valuation of absolute
music. What is unspoken but implied here is that
they also laid the groundwork for many of the
aesthetic assumptions that have tended to hobble
musical discourse in our own time: the treatment
of music in purely technical terms, the appreciation
of formal construction, and, Morrow seems to
imply, the positive spin placed on elements which
eighteenth-century German writers had no inhibi-
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tions about labelling both 'German' and 'mascu-
line', and contrasting with inferior foreign
elements.
It is much to Morrow's credit that, while making
such observations, she largely avoids the ideologi-
cal entrapments that have made critical musicology
a political minefield. She clearly has a highly
developed appreciation of what German music
critics in the late eighteenth century were able to
accomplish, and, despite her awareness of their
limitations, she shares that appreciation with the
reader.
The scope of Morrow's subject matter is indeed
vast. According to her own copious documentation,
she has examined 52 different periodicals covering
a 48-year period and containing 1,311 music
reviews. Most of her chapters includes tables of
the journals covered, the dates when they were
published or of those numbers surveyed for the
book, and the number of reviews in each one. The
sources range from music magazines such as J. A.
Hiller's Wochentliche Nachrichten to general scholarly
Correspondent. Morrow shows how the reviews break
down among these three types (approximately
equally), by decade (the largest number appeared
in the 1780s, and they tapered off again somewhat
in the 1790s before the founding of the Allgemeine
musikalische Zeitung in 1798), and by genre (key-
board sonatas always accounted for a large share,
but symphonies, which predominated during the
1760s, were virtually ignored by the 1790s, their
position being usurped by variations and keyboard
reductions of opera overtures). Morrow also care-
fully counts the numbers of reviews reprinted from
one journal to another.
Unfortunately-or perhaps inevitably-there is
no tabulation of the individual reviews. Morrow
does, however, include extended excerpts from the
original German texts in her notes, frequently
going beyond the portions she has elsewhere
translated into English. As a result, the notes
occupy fully half as much space as the text itself,
suggesting that setting the German and English
quotations in parallel columns might have been a
more user-friendly approach. In any case, the
source material is so vast that the reader is forced
to trust Morrow's judgement that the passages she
has excerpted are representative and typical.
The very premiss of Morrow's book depends on
this assumption, because she maintains throughout
that the often anonymous writers who reviewed
instrumental music in German periodicals between
1750 and 1798 functioned as a 'collective', provid-
ing, in the sense of Braudel's social history, the